Athletes fully recover from COVID-19 with no long-term heart damage
Athletes show no signs of long-term myocardial injury or myocarditis after recovering from COVID-19, according to new findings published in Circulation.
Researchers examined data from 137 NCAA athletes from three different universities. All athletes were recovering from a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis at the time of the evaluation, which included 12-lead electrocardiograms, transthoracic echocardiograms and evaluations of each participant’s cardiac troponin I level. When the clinicians saw a reason for potential concern, participants also underwent cardiac MRI (CRM) scans.
While 82% of athletes experienced mild or moderate COVID-19 symptoms, none of them had a severe case of COVID-19. Just 3.6% of patients had abnormal testing that made the research team turn to CMR. Of those patients, none of them had abnormal CMR findings.
“Concern for cardiovascular disease as a result of COVID-19 brought about recommendations for evaluating athletes after infection,” co-author Jason N. Johnson, MD, director of CMR at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, said in a prepared statement about his team’s research. “Our results show that none of the athletes who underwent cardiac MRI had abnormal findings.”
The full analysis is available here.
Michael has more than 18 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.